[squid-users] Squid Sizing and other things

Hi there

we have been using Squid Proxies for a couple of years now here at work. Squid
is a great piece of Software. I would like to share a few very basic things we
have done to tweak our Squid Proxies. If anyone thinks we did something stupid,
I would like to know - if this can help anyone that would be great.

Last Year we needed to establish an Proxy Infrastructure, which can handle
between 800-1000 Users. Not that much for Squid alone - there are much larger
Installations but this one may be quite typical for Medium Sized Enterprises.

We bought 2 HP ProLiant DL360 G4 Servers, each with one 3.4 Ghz Xeon CPU, 2 GB
Ram and 2 fast 15krpm 36GB SCSI Harddisks. The Disks are configured as a
Hardware-Raid 0 Stripe set. We had to use Red Hat Linux 7.3 because our Trend
Micro Virus Wall would not support actual Stuff like Fedora officially.

We used a custom made rpm (based on the work of the swelltech.com guys) for
Squid2.5Stable6 (we will probably update to Stable8 when it's out) and are using
diskd. The Cache lies on a ReiserFS Partition which is about 50 GB. (The other
partitions are "standard" ext3). Both Proxies have the other configured as
neighbour cache and on both the parent is the VirusWall (3.81), which is also
installed on the Squid Boxes.

If anyone is interested, I will post some infos about our Squid.conf and give
some performance Data from cachemgr.cgi - just let me know which ones are
interesting. Another idea would be to put together a Howto describing how one
can set up squid for an optimal performance - is that a good idea?

Finally (this post is much longer than I thought) we can now see that one of the
two boxes can handle our Traffic alone. During work-hours our MRTG Graphs show
about 30-50 req/s. Peaks have been up to 60 req/sec and still the performance is
ok, so I guess it could handle some more. The bottleneck here is of course not
squid itself but the Viruswall which is running between Squid and the Internet.
The overall Performance is much better than we expected :). The Cache-Ratios are
about 35-40% btw.

Kind Regards
Maik
Received on Thu Jan 27 2005 - 08:33:14 MST